wh5 = who, what, where, when and why. The five basic questions that are the structure of any story. Explored in "Who says what, where, when and and Why: Context in Conversation." An introduction to Sociolinguistics through Conversation Analysis. wh5 is the blogsite of the book published 2008 by Nanundo-Phoenix, Tokyo.

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Neutral vs bias

As the journalist
said to the linguist…

Linguist: Verbs, adjectives
and adverbs… they range from neutral through bias to outright hostile.

Journalist: What’s the
difference between neutral and bias?

Linguist: A biased
expression is one which can’t be replaced by a more neutral one. For example, saying "Your position is utterly wrong" could be expressed more

neutrally as "You may be mistaken."

Journalist: A word cloud
shows it better than just talking about it.

Linguist: Good idea. Then graph it.

________

Voice-overBut the distinction between bias
and hostile is fuzzy. Better to subsume hostile into bias.